Olga Prokopis takes Philippa Gregory to task on her misrepresentations of the past
Going by her author notes it appears that, in her most recent foray into the court of Henry VIII, Philippa Gregory would like us to forget the Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, that she depicted in her The Boleyn Inheritance (TBI, 2006). Gregory has written eleven novels set primarily within the Tudor period which have sold millions of copies, reaching audiences through adaptations for television, film, and the stage. Her Tudor series popularised the idea of the entire Boleyn family as ruthless, greedy, scheming social climbers, an interpretation that became established in popular culture and influenced subsequent depictions of Henry VIII’s court.
The wife of George Boleyn, Jane has been subject to a centuries-old rumour that she betrayed her husband by providing testimony that led to charges of incest with his own sister Anne Boleyn, entrenching a ‘woman scorned’ narrative in countless historical representations. The Boleyn Traitor is Gregory’s attempt to mitigate the harm she has caused Jane in her own portrayals. Influenced by Julia Fox’s 2008 Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford and subsequent reassessments of Jane, Gregory now abandons the villainous caricature and attempts to tell Jane’s story in a more balanced light.
While in her author notes Gregory refers to her first Tudor novel, The Other Boleyn Girl (TOBG, 2000), in which Jane plays a minor villain, actually spies through keyholes and is loathed by her Boleyn family. TBI—in which Jane is one of three narrators—does not receive a mention. The omission is revealing, since both novels helped to popularise many of the assumptions about Jane that Gregory now ostensibly seeks to challenge.
Writing that ‘few novelists would dare to invent such a horror as [Jane] seems to have been’, in TBI Gregory presents Jane as an unstable and malevolent figure: driven by jealousy, self-interest, and an erotic fixation on the relationship between her husband and his sister; responsible for betraying them; endangering successive queens; deliberately facilitating Katherine Howard’s adultery to further her own position; and whose ‘madness’ before execution was a calculated deception rather than a genuine nervous breakdown.
To be fair to Gregory, she was not working with the best source material at the time. The Jane in TOBG/TBI was derived largely from representations by eminent Tudor historian Lacey Baldwin Smith, who suggested that Jane was a voyeur, and feminist writer Karen Lindsey, who argued that Jane felt excluded from the relationship between Anne and George and described her as an ‘inveterate liar and troublemaker’. Still, authors make choices. Gregory adopted Professor Retha Warnicke’s heavily-disputed revisionist interpretation of George Boleyn’s sexuality while rejecting Warnicke’s equally important conclusion that Jane did not inform against her husband.
Gregory’s portrayal drew upon and amplified a long tradition of depicting Jane as a villainess. In a series of sixteenth-century elegiac complaint poems, George Cavendish framed Jane as ‘lustful’. As Cardinal Wolsey’s longtime gentleman usher, Cavendish was hostile to the Boleyns due to their role in his master’s downfall. But Cavendish’s representation of Jane was part of a wider portrayal of Anne Boleyn’s household as immoral, underserving and sexually deviant. It was Gregory who popularised the version of Jane who fantasises about her husband touching his sister while she is having sex with him. Gregory’s version of Jane has been widely influential, manifesting in The Tudors television series (2007–2010) and, more subtly, in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009).
Partly in response to Gregory’s fictionalised works, wider interest in the Boleyns generated scholarly work that analysed the historical realities of these figures. Julia Fox had actually started out writing about Anne, but her early research led her to reassess Jane. Successfully challenging many of the assumptions on which Gregory’s earlier portrayal of Jane had rested, Fox’s study exposed the weaknesses of the sources and assumptions on which Gregory’s characterisation depended and, more broadly, helped dismantle a longstanding tradition of portraying Jane as the villainess of the Boleyn story. While Fox’s work had limited immediate impact on popular representations, recent historical fiction and fantasy have increasingly moved away from depictions of women as one-dimensional antagonists. With TBT, it appears Gregory is responding to the current zeitgeist, revisiting her earlier characterisation of Jane with greater nuance.
With TBT, Gregory therefore faces the difficult task of rehabilitating a figure whose modern fictional reputation she herself did so much to establish. It is a genuine effort. The question is whether Gregory has succeeded, and the answer is ultimately ‘no’. Gregory remains too invested in older narratives: namely that Anne and George may have committed incest; that Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk, Jane’s and Anne’s uncle, was manipulating events to serve his family’s interests, and had Jane spying for him; and the idea that Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister and the architect of Anne’s downfall, assisted Jane after George’s execution proves Jane was spying for him. This demonstrates the issues of over-dramatisation in historical fiction. The idea that Jane was simultaneously spying for both Norfolk and Cromwell is difficult to sustain historically, yet it provides a more compelling narrative that has become embedded in popular knowledge.
The novel’s ostensibly sympathetic treatment of Jane departs so sharply from Gregory’s earlier characterisation that it has generated noticeable resistance among some of her established readership. TBT begins with Jane in a much happier and more equal marriage than previously suggested. Yet Jane is still spying for Norfolk. It is difficult to sympathise with Jane when, on her way back from summoning George to Anne’s side while she is having a miscarriage, she stops at Norfolk’s rooms to inform him. This Jane learned ‘spycraft’ in her early teens. This Jane latches onto Cromwell despite his role in the judicial murder of her husband.
The shadow of George’s and Anne’s inappropriate closeness looms throughout. If actual incest is not suggested in this particular book, George’s habit of parading around almost naked in Anne’s room, constantly brushing her hair, putting her to bed, and kissing her on the mouth ‘like a daughter’ creates an intimacy that exceeds conventional sibling affection. While Jane’s erotic fixation on their relationship has disappeared, her jealousy of their closeness has not. Instead, the real-life event that Gregory picks up on—where Jane was banished from court for interfering with Henry VIII’s mistress on Anne’s behalf–becomes the catalyst for a permanent rift in and Jane’s and George’s relationship.
Anne and Jane at least have a close relationship in this novel, but Anne is the same Anne of TOBG, sharp, scheming and unpleasant. One of the jarring aspects of this Anne is her frequent complaints against Jane—‘For Christ’s sake!’ she snaps. ‘Your endless learning! Who cares?’
We know the historical Anne Boleyn did care. Records show that Thomas Boleyn ensured she received an exemplary education in an age when women’s education was not always a priority. While Jane, raised by esteemed scholar and humanist Lord Morley, likely had a similar education, the surviving evidence for Jane is far less substantial than it is for Anne. The choice by Gregory to depict Jane as the intellect and Anne as the archetypal scheming temptress is significant, and a clear departure from Gregory’s first iteration of Jane.
Yet TBT also contains a faint strain of anti-intellectualism that cannot be ignored. Its scholars and intellectuals are frequently depicted as emotionally stunted figures, and Jane, Morley, and Thomas Cromwell all conform to this pattern. Learning and intellect are associated with detachment rather than empathy, becoming part of the coldness that develops in Jane after she is banished from court and abandoned by Anne and George. Gregory thus constructs a Jane who becomes increasingly ambitious and emotionally unfeeling as the novel progresses. My ambition is satisfied. I am a widow without grief.
The widespread fixation on Jane both returning to court and receiving assistance from Cromwell should be addressed. After George’s execution, Jane was forced to write to Cromwell because her jointure had not been paid in full by her father-in-law. She likely did so because the widow of William Brereton (a courtier outside of Anne’s household who was attainted and executed in the coup) had recently been granted her husband’s lands. In addition to her full jointure, Jane also requested some personal items of George’s which may be seen in an inventory taken after Jane’s execution, including their marriage bed. It is evidenced by Cromwell’s assistance to Brereton’s wife, and others, that Jane was not receiving an unprecedented favour. There may also be an element of malice on Cromwell’s part, because as Thomas Boleyn’s biographer Lauren Mackay notes Cromwell hounded Thomas when he could, enforcing his payments strictly while tolerating arrears from other nobles. Many overemphasise Jane’s ‘survival’, trying to use this as proof of providing testimony against George, but she was not ‘the only Boleyn’ to survive. The entire family survived except for Anne and George. If Thomas Boleyn was compelled to carry on in his grief as though the king were justified in executing his children, then Jane should be afforded the same understanding.
Jane returned to the Tudor court some months after her husband’s death and served as lady-in-waiting to Henry’s next three wives. In TBT Jane’s attention to her actual position in society as a noblewoman—thinking about expenditure, rents, lands, and household management—presents a welcome alternative to portrayals of women as merely plotting and scheming. However, the suggestion that Jane imagines she might influence England through Katherine Howard stretches credulity. Jane’s involvement in Katherine’s and courtier Thomas Culpeper’s alleged adulterous relationship is romanticised within the novel itself, but Gregory’s author notes reveal her belief that Jane facilitated the affair because she perceived an opportunity for her own advancement. In effect, the narrative returns to the same interpretation advanced in TBI: that Jane and Norfolk encouraged the affair in the hope that Katherine would conceive and thereby secure the Howard family’s position through an heir. Gregory also reprises the suggestion that Jane’s mental collapse after being imprisoned in the Tower of London was feigned. Furthermore, while her treatment of Katherine is more sympathetic than in earlier works, Gregory remains reluctant to engage fully with the possibility that Katherine was the victim of sexual coercion and abuse, a position that still sits uneasily in contemporary efforts to reassess Katherine’s experiences.
Gregory’s commitment to recovering women’s voices proves selective. Although the novel offers more sympathetic portrayals of Katherine Howard and Jane Rochford, it ultimately returns to narratives that promote scandal and intrigue. Gregory writes that ‘Jane cannot simply have been in the wrong time and place – a key witness at two trials for royal adultery, and two royal divorces’. This is neither entirely accurate nor especially persuasive. Given Jane’s position within the queen’s household, it is entirely plausible that she was repeatedly caught up in the marital turbulence of Henry VIII’s reign, as were many others. It was Henry who married six different women, after all. A commitment to women’s voices means little if those voices are only believed when they align with familiar narratives.
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